SMOS has shown the importance of achieving low level of noise floor and side lobes for best image quality in aperture synthesis radiometry. One key factor is the similarity between element patterns. During the TRP study on Super-MIRAS a solution was proposed based on dummy elements. This activity includes the following tasks : - To build of a representative part of an aperture synthesis radiometer at L-band with a conventional ground plane and with the proposed dummy element technique. - To measure of the patterns of the active elements.

The main aim of OPTIMAL was to perform a feasibility study on a potential mission or system to detect marine plastic litter through satellite remote sensing. To do so, the project activities involved the following aspects:

This study focused on the synergistic retrieval of cloud information from active and passive observations. While this synergistic approach is well established for precipitation, it is used less for clouds.

In recent years, surface-penetrating radars have formed a part of several ESA missions in both monostatic and bi-static configurations. Such radars can be found, for instance, on board Mars Express where, using MARSIS, the Martian sub-surface is sensed, as well as on board Rosetta where CONSERT was used to probe the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

With the launch of the first Sentinel satellites, a new era in Earth observation has started that allows for the development of new approaches that use these novel observations at high temporal frequencies and fine spatial resolution with complementary information from the optical and microwave spectral domains. One very important application for is the monitoring of crops.

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The objective of the Aeolus/EarthCARE Aerosol Assimilation Studies (A3S) project was to allow assimilation of the Aeolus L2A lidar backscatter data, also paving the way for the assimilation of EarthCARE products. Since the Aeolus and EarthCARE missions were not yet launched at the time of the study, demonstration datasets based on model data (MOCAGE model for the aerosols and the IFS for the clouds) and a one-day dataset based on CALIPSO data (reprocessed at the UV wavelength and with the Aeolus orbit data) was created.